PARALLEL MOTHERS
*****
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Screenwriter: Pedro Almodóvar
Principal cast:
Penélope Cruz
Milena Smit
Rossy de Palma
Israel Elejalde
Aitana Sánchez-Gijón
Julieta Serrano
Country: Spain
Classification: M
Runtime: 123 mins.
Australian release date: 27 January 2022.
Acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar just seems to get better with each film he makes (let’s forget about I’m So Excited! - even a maestro is entitled to the occasional slip-up), refining his craft and visual language as he evolves. It’s an impressive achievement for a man now aged in his seventies; he refuses to rest on his laurels and resists the temptation to make the same type of movie that he’s made before. His latest occupies completely different terrain to his last, the semi-autobiographical Pain and Glory. It’s even more remarkable when you know that Almodóvar never had any formal training in the filmmaking art. Now, with Parallel Mothers, he is at the top of his game and his latest work earnt a rapturous nine-minute standing ovation when it opened last year’s Venice Film Festival and a Best Actress Award for its star, Penélope Cruz.
After Madrid-based professional photographer Janis (Cruz) finishes a shoot with forensic anthropologist Arturo (Israel Elejalde), she asks his advice about how to officially unearth the site of a mass grave near the village of her birth that she’s been told holds the body of her great-grandfather. The position of the site has been passed down by the women in her family since the atrocity occurred during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. Arturo is married and lives in another city but he and Janis embark on an affair that results in her pregnancy. While in a maternity ward preparing for the birth of her child, Janis meets a teenage girl, Ana (Milena Smit), who is also about to give birth and the two of them exchange phone numbers and promise to stay in touch. Time passes and Janis changes her telephone number and when they eventually meet again, their circumstances have dramatically changed: one of them no longer has their baby and the other is keeping a terrible secret that will have a profound effect on them both.
Parallel Mothers is a film about memory and history and how the two connect and overlap. It ends with a quote from the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano: “No history is mute. No matter how much they own it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth. Despite deafness and ignorance, the time that was continues to tick inside the time that is.” It’s a story about unearthing the truth, both on a macro and a micro scale, about speaking the truth about Spain’s past and the truth about the two women. To summarise Galeano, the truth will out - if somebody knows the truth about something they must, sooner or later, reveal it or it will destroy them. Almodóvar, who also wrote the screenplay, exposes this fact via the convoluted melodrama that is at the heart of Janis’s and Ana’s lives. “It’s the moral dilemma of a woman who on one hand is searching for the historical truth about her ancestors,” he recently told The New York Times Magazine, “however, in her own life that truth doesn’t exist. And that provokes a terrific complex of guilt and even of shame.”
The movie moves along at a clip in the hands of editor Teresa Font. Her cuts mark the passage of time in leaps and bounds but it is easy to keep up with the action, such is Almodóvar’s skill in setting time and place. His usual cinematographer of choice, José Luis Alcaine, keeps Parallel Mothers looking bright and colourful in the director’s customary style and composer Alberto Iglesias, another Almodóvar regular, has once more written a glorious score to accompany the film. Cruz, who’s now made seven features with Amodóvar, and Smit, a new discovery, are wonderful together, complementing each other despite the great differences in their characters’ ages, backgrounds and approaches to life. The camera loves them both, particularly Cruz, who’s often filmed in tight close-up while the background fades to black. Parallel Mothers is exceptional.
Screenwriter: Pedro Almodóvar
Principal cast:
Penélope Cruz
Milena Smit
Rossy de Palma
Israel Elejalde
Aitana Sánchez-Gijón
Julieta Serrano
Country: Spain
Classification: M
Runtime: 123 mins.
Australian release date: 27 January 2022.
Acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar just seems to get better with each film he makes (let’s forget about I’m So Excited! - even a maestro is entitled to the occasional slip-up), refining his craft and visual language as he evolves. It’s an impressive achievement for a man now aged in his seventies; he refuses to rest on his laurels and resists the temptation to make the same type of movie that he’s made before. His latest occupies completely different terrain to his last, the semi-autobiographical Pain and Glory. It’s even more remarkable when you know that Almodóvar never had any formal training in the filmmaking art. Now, with Parallel Mothers, he is at the top of his game and his latest work earnt a rapturous nine-minute standing ovation when it opened last year’s Venice Film Festival and a Best Actress Award for its star, Penélope Cruz.
After Madrid-based professional photographer Janis (Cruz) finishes a shoot with forensic anthropologist Arturo (Israel Elejalde), she asks his advice about how to officially unearth the site of a mass grave near the village of her birth that she’s been told holds the body of her great-grandfather. The position of the site has been passed down by the women in her family since the atrocity occurred during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. Arturo is married and lives in another city but he and Janis embark on an affair that results in her pregnancy. While in a maternity ward preparing for the birth of her child, Janis meets a teenage girl, Ana (Milena Smit), who is also about to give birth and the two of them exchange phone numbers and promise to stay in touch. Time passes and Janis changes her telephone number and when they eventually meet again, their circumstances have dramatically changed: one of them no longer has their baby and the other is keeping a terrible secret that will have a profound effect on them both.
Parallel Mothers is a film about memory and history and how the two connect and overlap. It ends with a quote from the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano: “No history is mute. No matter how much they own it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth. Despite deafness and ignorance, the time that was continues to tick inside the time that is.” It’s a story about unearthing the truth, both on a macro and a micro scale, about speaking the truth about Spain’s past and the truth about the two women. To summarise Galeano, the truth will out - if somebody knows the truth about something they must, sooner or later, reveal it or it will destroy them. Almodóvar, who also wrote the screenplay, exposes this fact via the convoluted melodrama that is at the heart of Janis’s and Ana’s lives. “It’s the moral dilemma of a woman who on one hand is searching for the historical truth about her ancestors,” he recently told The New York Times Magazine, “however, in her own life that truth doesn’t exist. And that provokes a terrific complex of guilt and even of shame.”
The movie moves along at a clip in the hands of editor Teresa Font. Her cuts mark the passage of time in leaps and bounds but it is easy to keep up with the action, such is Almodóvar’s skill in setting time and place. His usual cinematographer of choice, José Luis Alcaine, keeps Parallel Mothers looking bright and colourful in the director’s customary style and composer Alberto Iglesias, another Almodóvar regular, has once more written a glorious score to accompany the film. Cruz, who’s now made seven features with Amodóvar, and Smit, a new discovery, are wonderful together, complementing each other despite the great differences in their characters’ ages, backgrounds and approaches to life. The camera loves them both, particularly Cruz, who’s often filmed in tight close-up while the background fades to black. Parallel Mothers is exceptional.